The Bone Collector

“Maybe he’s got her at a cleanup site,” Sellitto said.

“Could be,” Rhyme agreed.

Sellitto ordered his young assistant, “Call EPA and city Environmental. Find out if there’re any sites where cleanup’s going on right now.”

The detective made the call.

“Bo,” Rhyme asked Hauma

“Ready to roll,” the ESU commander confirmed. “Though I gotta tell you, we’ve got over half the force tied up with this UN thing. They’re on loan to the Secret Service and UN security.”

“Got some EPA info here.” Banks gestured to Hauma

Banks jumped. “Jesus.”

From the angle where he lay, Rhyme couldn’t see what had fallen. Hauma

Rhyme felt several pairs of eyes on him but he said nothing about the bone. Hauma

“We have to narrow it down more. Let’s see, the sand,” Rhyme said to Cooper. “’Scope it. Tell me what you think.”

Sellitto handed the evidence envelope to the tech, who poured the contents out onto an enamel examination tray. The glistening powder left a small cloud of dust. There was also a stone, worn smooth, which slid into the center of the pile.

Lincoln Rhyme’s throat caught. Not at what he saw – he didn’t yet know what he was looking at – but at the flawed nerve impulse that shot from his brain and died halfway to his useless right arm, urging it to grab a pencil and to probe. The first time in a year or so he’d felt that urge. It nearly brought tears into his eyes and his only solace was the memory of the tiny bottle of Seconal and the plastic bag that Dr. Berger carried with him – images that hovered like a saving angel over the room.

He cleared his throat. “Print it!”

“What?” Cooper asked.

“The stone.”

Sellitto looked at him inquiringly.

“The rock doesn’t belong there,” Rhyme said. “Apples and oranges. I want to know why. Print it.”

Using porcelain-tipped forceps, Cooper picked up the stone and examined it. He slipped on goggles and hit the rock with a beam from a PoliLight – a power pack the size of a car battery with a light wand attached.

“Nothing,” Cooper said.

“VMD?”

Vacuum metal deposition is the Cadillac of techniques for raising latent prints on nonporous surfaces. It evaporates gold or zinc in a vacuum chamber containing the object to be tested; the metal coats the latent print, making the whorls and peaks very visible.

But Cooper didn’t have a VMD with him.

“What do you have?” asked Rhyme, not pleased.

“ Sudan black, stabilized physical developer, iodine, amido black, DFO and gentian violet, Magna-Brush.”

He’d also brought ninhydrin for raising prints on porous surfaces and a Super Glue frame for smooth surfaces. Rhyme recalled the stu

This was the method Cooper now used. With forceps he set the rock in a small glass box and put a dab of glue on the hot plate inside. A few minutes later he lifted the rock out.

“We’ve got something,” he said. He dusted it with long-wavelength UV powder and hit it with the beam from the PoliLight wand. A print was clearly visible. Dead center. Cooper photographed it with Polaroid CU- 5, a 1:1 camera. He showed the picture to Rhyme.

“Hold it closer.” Rhyme squinted as he examined it. “Yes! He rolled it.”

Rolling prints – rocking a finger onto a surface – produced an impression different from one made by picking up an object. It was a subtle difference – in the width of the friction ridges at various points on the pattern – but one that Rhyme now recognized clearly.

“And look, what’s that?” he mused. “That line.” There was a faint crescent mark above the print itself.

“It looks almost like -”

“Yep,” Rhyme said, “her fingernail. You wouldn’t normally get that. But I’ll bet he tipped the stone just to make sure it got picked up. It left an oil impression. Like a friction ridge.”

“Why would he do that?” Sachs asked.

Once more miffed that nobody seemed to be picking up these points as fast as he was, Rhyme explained tersely, “He’s telling us two things. First, he’s making sure we know the victim’s a woman. In case we didn’t make the co

“Why do that?” Banks asked.

“To up the ante,” Rhyme said. “Make us sweat more. He’s let us know there’s a woman at risk. He’s valuated the victims – just like we all do – even though we claim we don’t.” Rhyme happened to glance at Sachs’s hands. He was surprised to see that, for such a beautiful woman, her fingers were a mess. Four ended in fleshy Band-Aids and several others were chewed to the quick. The cuticle of one was caked with brown blood. He noticed too the red inflammation of the skin beneath her eyebrows, from plucking them, he assumed. And a scratch mark beside her ear. All self-destructive habits. There’re a million ways to do yourself in besides pills and Armagnac.

Rhyme a

The aide blurted, “What map?”

“You know what map I mean.”

Thom sighed. “Not a clue, Lincoln.”

Glancing out the window and speaking half to himself, Rhyme mused, “The railroad underpass, the bootleg tu

“Which is where?”

“The research files for my book. Where else?”

Thom dug through folders and pulled out a photocopy of a long, horizontal map of Manhattan. “This?”

“That, yes!”

It was the Randel Survey, drawn in 1811 for the commissioners of the city to plan out the grid of streets in Manhattan. The map had been printed horizontally, with Battery Park, south, to the left and Harlem, north, to the right. Laid out this way, the island resembled the body of a dog leaping, its narrow head lifted for an attack.

“Pin it up there. Good.”

As the aide did, Rhyme blurted, “Thom, we’re going to deputize you. Give him a shiny badge or something, Lon.”

“ Lincoln,” he muttered.

“We need you. Come on. Haven’t you always wanted to be Sam Spade or Kojak?”

“Only Judy Garland,” the aide replied.

“Jessica Fletcher then! You’ll be writing the profile. Come on now, get out that Mont Blanc you’re always letting stick vainly out of your shirt pocket.”

The young man rolled his eyes as he lifted his Parker pen and took a dusty yellow pad from a stack under one of the tables.

“No, I’ve got a better idea,” Rhyme a

Thom selected a Monet lily pads and mounted it to the wall.

“On the top,” the criminalist ordered, “write ‘Unsub 823.’ Then four columns. ‘Appearance. Residence. Vehicle. Other.’ Beautiful. Now, let’s start. What do we know about him?”